Hi guys,
I am trying to accelerate one of my Intel RST RAID volumes with an Adata SP310 64GB SSD. My configuration is as follows:
Asus H77M-Plus motherboard, Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, Intel RST 14.8.0.1042 drivers
2 x Seagate 500GB HDDs (RAID0 volume)
2 x Seagate 1000GB HDDs (RAID1 volume + RAID0 volume)
Adata 64GB SSD
I am trying to accelerate the RAID0 volume on the 500GB HDDs with the Adata SSD. However, I do not want to utilize the whole capacity of the SSD as a cache volume, because I want to provide some manual overprovisioning for the SSD (e.g. by allocating only 50GB for a RST cache volume and leave the rest of the SSD unused). The problem is that as far as I have 3 existing RAID volumes, Intel RST does not allow me to specify a custom cache volume size but forces me to use the whole SSD for the caching purposes. I suspect that this is because when only a part of the SSD is used for caching, RST automatically configures the rest of the SSD as a RAID0 data volume, thus the number of my RAID volumes would become 5 (while the maximum allowed number by Intel RST is 4).
As a workaround I tried to detach temporarily the 1000GB HDDs (thus limiting the current number of RAID volumes to 1) and I then was able to specify custom cache volume size (50 GB). However, Intel RST configured automatically the rest of the SSD as a single-disk RAID0 volume (a data volume) and did not allow me to delete it (even through the BIOS utility). In this way I am not able to attach again the 1000GB HDDs (because the total number of my RAID volumes would become 5).
My question is: How can I avoid creation of the "data volume" on the SSD (or how can I remove it after its creation) in order to decrease the number of my RAID volumes to 4?
Thanks.